Kiip Up #11 – Gamesalad, Walgreens, and now we’re bi-weekly!

First thing’s first. We’re going to try moving Kiip Up into a biweekly letter. It gives us a chance to kiip things fresh while saving your inboxes!

As I had briefly mentioned in the last Kiip Up, we were about to celebrate a very special event with Gamesalad this past Monday. We were very excited last week to announce our integration partnership into their builder. You can read more about it from our friends at Venturebeat and Pocketgamer.

The partnership encompasses something that I’ve been looking forward to building into our network for some time: genre variety. What this means is that if your brand is a sports brand, and you’re looking to reach out into sports-themed games – a look into the Gamesalad network would reveal dozens. It’s a profound change in scale in how themes and genres can play into integration.

And one last note: last week we just went live with our holiday rewards from our friends at Sears. If you find Sears and some holiday joy in your games this holiday; don’t forget totell us what you bought! Stay tuned next week for some more holiday announcements; this will be a month to remember =)

Speaking of the holidays, early figures from online retailers in the US show that mobile traffic over Thanksgiving was up 160% from last year. Is it because consumers were using their mobile devices to search for deals before hitting the stores on Friday? Well, they were using their mobile devices on Friday too — with mobile driving 14.3% of online traffic and 9.8% of sales on Black Friday. That’s a serious increase from last year.